In 2024, Bridge To A Cure Foundation turned turbulence into progress. What began as a stormy forecast for childhood cancer research ended with clear signs of brighter days ahead, thanks to a community determined to improve outcomes for kids everywhere.

A Year Defined by Progress

Last year marked critical milestones in Bridge To A Cure’s plan to reduce pediatric brain cancer 50% by 2030.

• Fueled Innovation: We helped advance the M³ scientific approach, integrating multidisciplinary expertise, multiomics data, and multimodal insights to accelerate breakthroughs to cures and cultivate more personalized therapies.
• Expanded Data Access: Our support enabled more than 800 new tissue samples to be processed for the Pediatric Brain Tumor Atlas, now housed in the NIH-funded Kids First Data Resource Center, where it powers discovery alongside 35 other pediatric and rare disease datasets.
• Drove AI-Powered Breakthroughs: Through collaborations like the $10 million ARPA-H RADIANT project, we laid the groundwork for real-time clinical data integration—an innovation that promises to unlock faster, better-informed treatments tailored to each child.
• Catalyzed Safer Therapies: Strategic funding advanced studies in immunotherapy, apoptosis, and angiogenesis—pioneering new ways to fight tumors without devastating side effects.

These aren’t just research terms—they represent real hope for children and families who deserve a future beyond the shadow of cancer.

Robert Martin, Founder and President of Bridge To A Cure Foundation, reflects on this incredible year of progress:

“Our journey began with a promise—one born from love, forged through loss, and carried forward by hope. What started as a vow to one child has become a mission for all: to reduce childhood cancer deaths by 50% by 2030. Together, we are turning storms into sunshine for children everywhere.”

Why It Matters

The truth remains stark: childhood cancer is the leading cause of disease-related death in kids, and most treatments are decades old. But 2024 proved something powerful: collaboration works, data saves lives, and innovation accelerates cures.

The Forecast for 2025: Bold and Clear

Our mission is unwavering: unite and transform the childhood cancer research community to reduce deaths by 50% by 2030. To get there, 2025 is a year of bold initiatives:

• Strengthening Global Data Ecosystems: Invest in platforms that equip researchers across institutions and borders.
• Expanding AI Capabilities: Build AI-powered analytics tools that turn complex data into actionable treatments faster than ever.
• Championing Policy for Progress: Advocate for legislation that sustains research funding and removes barriers to discovery.
• Mobilize the Bridge To A Cure Movement: Engage with families, peer foundations, and industry partners to eliminate silos and amplify impact.

The clouds are breaking, but the work is far from done. Together, we can turn today’s breakthroughs into tomorrow’s cures.

What keeps Bridge To A Cure pushing ahead in 2025? We’re simply Fulfilling the Promise made. You can help us keep our commitment to families facing the devastating effects of brain tumors. Read our 2024 Annual Report. Share our mission. Give to fuel breakthroughs that will save our kids.

We have a common enemy: childhood brain tumors. The fact is, there have been many amazing oncology professionals, scientists, researchers, and institutions working tirelessly on cures over the past 50 years – half a century! And yet, not one treatment has been developed for childhood brain tumors. Over this time, roughly 750,000 children have endured the painful, cruel journey of the #1 killer of kids by disease.

So what’s missing in our country’s childhood cancer research model that makes progress much slower than it should be?

Collaboration.

Bridge To A Cure greatly respects the work these childhood cancer heroes are doing for childhood cancer patients. We just want them to work together – and to share their data and discoveries to arrive at breakthroughs to cures sooner. We understand that by working together we can accelerate the pace toward cures. And when young lives are waiting for help, and families are holding on to hope, every day matters — every second matters.

There are three major players seeking new therapies for childhood brain tumors:

• Children’s Brain Tumor Network
• Pacific Neuro-Oncology Consortium
• Pediatric Brain Tumor Consortium

Additionally, these groups each include approximately 15 research organizations working on childhood brain tumors under their umbrellas. In other words, there are a lot of experts with a lot of knowledge involved in this race to cures. And most of them are holding their data within their own institutions and consortia rather than sharing with the entire childhood cancer research community.

Consortia Collaboration Will Save Lives

Sharing data and patient information will cut years from research to discovery, to trials to effective use, and to saving lives. We could accomplish in ten years what now takes up to twenty. Think of the thousands upon thousands of lives this can save.

We want these three consortia to:

• Molecularly characterize and sequence all biospecimens they house.
• Share data they have about the patients in a way that protects patient privacy. This includes age, lifestyle, other health issues, family histories, and circumstances.
• Share all data from childhood tumors.
• Provide access for all researchers and organizations working on childhood brain tumors.

Creating teamwork within the system will absolutely speed up the process leading to breakthrough results.

Collecting and sharing data is the first step. Next, we need machine learning and AI to help decipher and analyze everything – there’s just too much data for one analyst or team to ever digest. AI is so powerful that it can process in one hour what it would take a researcher to process in a year.

Once the network for sharing is set up, analysts can tap into it and add content they’ve collected that matches up with a similar patient or type of brain tumor whose data research is further along. In this way, more brilliant minds have better knowledge from which to develop treatments and break through to cures.

Obstacles to Collaboration

There are several reasons that data sharing happens less frequently than it could. We understand some of them, and they make a degree of sense from a business perspective. It’s just that in this instance, the business end is inhibiting the health of children.

Key reasons organizations don’t share include:

• Seeing their project through. Research institutions take pride in their work and progress. It’s human nature to want to see what you started through to the end. Unfortunately, this mentality adds years to a potential breakthrough.
• These groups receive grants and donations based on their progress toward discoveries. If essential data is shared, the fear is the money they need would be reduced because they alone are no longer making progress, so they choose to “protect” their data.
• The dilemma is that if an institution or consortium shares data, another may make that final connection to a treatment or cure. And which group will get the credit and the accompanying bounty? Probably the one who finished the process, not the one who laid the foundation.

Bridge To A Cure’s Collaborative Approach

In 2018, under the leadership of Dr. Ned Sharpless, the NCI started the Children’s Cancer Data Initiative. This ten-year, $500 million program will provide researchers and oncologists access to all data for all types of pediatric cancer.

This much-needed initiative is progressing, but much too slowly because they are trying to tackle all childhood cancers at once. Bridge To A Cure Foundation’s plan first addresses the most deadly form of childhood cancers: brain tumors. By doing this, we can move faster to save lives, and can then apply this model not only to other childhood cancers, but to all kinds of serious childhood diseases and disorders.

We believe we can speed up and be the catalyst for change. We understand the players, the situation, and we have the framework to accomplish our mission unify and transform the childhood cancer research community to reduce deaths due to childhood cancer 50% by 2030. 

Learn more about our progress to open up real-time, collaborative access to the data that leads to cures here.

You may have increasingly heard the term personalized medicine used and wondered what it meant. Does it mean there is a treatment made just for you?

Not quite.

Let’s look at it in terms of childhood brain cancers. Bridge To A Cure Foundation stands with partner Children’s Brain Tumor Network. Their mission hits the mark:

The right diagnosis.
The right treatment.
For each child.

Finally, we appear to be moving from a one-size-fits-all treatment to a tailored, personalized approach for treating childhood brain tumors. Up until now, our children have received brain cancer treatments developed for adults, which can cause irreparable damage to their young bodies and minds.

Thanks to increases in funding, large amounts of shared data, and advances in our understanding of how both our bodies and diseases work, treatments can now be developed that are more effective and less harmful for our children. For us, too.

The bottom line? Personalized medicine promises to help our children live better and longer because they’ll receive treatments designed for their needs and bodies.

Why have treatments specifically for childhood brain tumors been so slow to develop?

Several reasons:

1. There are fewer mutations in kids’ genomes than those found in adults, making the cancer difficult to identify.
2. Childhood brain tumors are difficult to target with treatments.
3. Concerns about and risk of dosage and toxicity.
4. Childhood brain tumors are rare, making data scarce.
5. Brain tumors are complicated, with more than 100 different types.
6. There haven’t been enough samples, clinical data, etc., to conduct a study.

Now, these obstacles are steadily being overcome – conquered.

We have a more extensive database of biospecimens being shared – thanks in large part to Project Accelerate. Bridge To A Cure Foundation’s collaboration with Children’s Brain Tumor Network will lead to accelerated discoveries.

This decentralization of data has been vital, but to win the battle against childhood brain tumors, we need to have all institutions worldwide share their data.

The more biospecimens we have, along with additional funding for molecular analysis and sequencing, the more intelligent we can be about what works (and what doesn’t), and the more precise, personalized, and humane we can be with each treatment.

As we shared in previous communications, Project Accelerate will help prioritize the most aggressive tumor types, supporting research for those cancers lacking existing data.

Clinical Trials

In the pediatric space, clinical trials will start to hit the forefront. Rather than repurposing adult treatments and dosages, we’ll be able to develop specific therapies of specialized drugs for childhood brain tumors driven by the genetic and genomic characteristics present in young patients.

This is a big step.

The Race Act

Short for Research to Accelerate Cures and Equity for Children Act, the RACE Act went into effect on August 18, 2020, and significantly increased the number of required studies devoted to pediatric cancer research, drugs, and therapies.

The expectation is that the RACE Act will level the playing field for children with cancer.

Hope

What can we take from all this?

That there is hope!

Advancements are happening. The Bridge To A Cure network of alliances is receiving the attention it has needed, and we’re on the precipice of seeing a tremendous impact. These efforts will define better treatment vulnerabilities and lead to a multi-model approach for treatment.

We’re in an age of significant acceleration, where the use of adult treatments for childhood brain tumors will end.

Together

Bridge To A Cure will continue to help unite and transform our community with the help of innovative partners like Children’s Brain Tumor Network, and ensure that the data out there is available to all those working to find the cures we so desperately want.

We are more empowered, more enabled than ever before. And that feels like progress.

Click here to learn more about how Project Accelerate is advancing discoveries that can lead to cures for childhood brain tumors.